Alejandro González Iñárritu’s long-awaited dark comedy Digger, starring Tom Cruise as a culpable oil baron racing to avert an apocalyptic iceberg, has arrived for press screening ahead of its theatrical release on Oct. 2, 2026, and the spoiler-free reviews painting a striking portrait of a pitch-black satire that trades easy optimism for a deliberately uncomfortable look at climate inaction and unfettered capitalism.
The film, which Cruise has headlined since 2017’s American Made, marks a deliberate departure from his action-hero persona and instead places the star at the center of a sprawling, overly ambitious apocalypse comedy. Working under an embargo agreed to in order to view the film, critics who have seen it describe a sprawling satire that is funny without necessarily being fun, built around a thesis as bleak as it is timely for the year 2026.
An oil baron, an iceberg, and no good options
On the surface, Iñárritu tells the story of Digger Rockwell, a blustering oil magnate who inadvertently unleashes an apocalyptic disaster on Earth in the form of a massive chunk of the Greenland ice sheet hurtling toward Northern Europe. Digger then races to avert the catastrophe, convening a team of top scientists and government officials to weigh every conceivable option, from nuking the iceberg to deploying an AI-powered information blackout.
Ultimately, when confronted with the reality that there are no viable solutions and that he is entirely to blame, Digger turns offensive — not against the iceberg, but against its would-be victims. In doing so, the film grapples transparently with climate change and the bleak prospect that the planet’s future rests in the hands of a handful of powerful figures with little interest in saving the world if it cuts into their profits.
Cruise channels his inner grotesque
Cruise, shifting gears out of action-hero mode for the first time since 2017’s American Made, delivers what amounts to a career-defining turn as Digger Rockwell. He is blustering and boisterous in a manner not seen onscreen since he played the grotesque Hollywood executive Les Grossman in 2008’s Tropic Thunder, combining that character’s over-the-top bravado with the unhinged aging-cowboy energy of The Simpsons’ “Rich Texan.” The result is a man so powerful and self-assured that he is convinced he can talk his way out of any situation.
He delivers monologue after enthralling monologue designed to pummel everyone into submission, whether that’s a low-level scientist warning him of impending climate disaster or the President of the United States. How far does Cruise go to make an impression? In one early scene, we see his prosthetically expanded butt crack; later, he wriggles out of culpability with a blistering speech about the allure of fossil fuel as he struts, jumps, and kicks across a courtroom full of angry politicians.
spoiler-free review of Digger
Standing easily alongside Cruise is John Goodman as the Donald Trump-inspired President Compton. Though the president’s actual politics matter little to the film, the way his cabinet swarms around him like eager yes men — only to break into a prayer describing Compton as an emissary of God — makes clear whom Iñárritu’s movie is really about. Goodman does not merely channel Trump; he matches Cruise beat-for-beat in a contest to see who can be the loudest and crudest while maintaining a veneer of authority, and he comes out on top.
A supporting cast built around a core trio
Also ready to spar with Cruise is Riz Ahmed as Dr. Ganesh, a scientist in charge of safety at Digger’s ill-fated Greenland oil-drilling operation. While Compton mostly serves to rile Cruise’s character up, Ganesh exists to drag him back down to Earth. In one quiet moment, the two fly across the Atlantic on a private jet to deliver bad news, during which Digger goads his vegan employee into eating a piece of raw fatty tuna — a scene that captures the film’s central thesis that collective efforts to save the planet amount to nothing when the most powerful people simply do not care.
While Digger’s cast is large and impressive, with Sandra Hüller, Jesse Plemons, and Emma D’Arcy all pulling their weight, it is really that core trio doing most of the heavy lifting. The film is therefore mostly three men yelling at each other for two hours, though reviewers note it is some of the finest such yelling audiences are likely to hear in a theater this year.
A surreal world built to unsettle
Thanks to production design by Dennis Gassner and Richard Johnson, Digger looks like nothing else audiences will see this year. When we first meet Digger Rockwell, he wakes in bed and gazes out at a palatial garden of perfectly manicured trees and flowing mist, picking up his aging white-haired cat only to reveal a ghastly animatronic puppet in the vein of one of Jim Henson’s less family-friendly creations. Each location is carefully designed to feel both imposing in its grandeur and surreal in its fakeness, combining the obsessive detail of Wes Anderson with the slap-dash creativity of Michel Gondry to achieve something uniquely uncanny.
From the plot to the shouty dialogue to the scenery to the twists, everything about Digger points in the same damning direction: the Earth is doomed, and anyone with the power to stop it stopped caring decades ago. Digger Rockwell is not a stand-in for any single real-world figure; he represents capitalism itself — unrestrained, unstoppable, and unwilling to admit to even the slightest mistake.
Looking Ahead
Digger arrives in theaters on Oct. 2, 2026, when audiences can finally discuss its many spoilers and the debates surrounding the film truly begin. Whether it succeeds by the financial or critical standards that capitalism has decided matter for a movie of this scale remains to be seen, but Iñárritu appears determined to reject those very standards as vehemently as his protagonist rejects accountability — a fitting stance for a movie that seems more interested in provoking conversation than in pleasing everyone.
Join the conversation